Pointing to discussions about how validators can collude to shut a network down, Emin Gun Sirer Stated:  Looks like Avalanche is the most decentralized PoS blockchain. Does anyone have the same data for PoW chains?

The Larry A Smart contract Developer stated, “Nakamoto coefficient:   The minimum number of validators who can collude to shut down a network Avalanche – 26 (1,001) Solana – 18 (849) THORChain – 10 (37) BSC – 7 (20) Terra – 7 (130) Cosmos – 6 (125) Fantom – 3 (45) Polygon – 2 (100).

Why no data for Ethereum? You might find sources that say Eth2 has >200K validators, far more than any other network. This is, however, *extremely misleading* For Eth2, each validator represents a 32 ETH deposit. Thus, a node can run arbitrarily many validators.

To evaluate Eth2, we need to know how many *nodes* (not validators!) are participating in consensus and the staked amount of each of them. I can’t find any source of this data. Neither of the two popular explorers, beaconcha_in and BeaconScan, tracks nodes.  We can, however, have a reasonable guess from deposit data. According to nansen_ai, the 4 biggest depositors: Binance, Kraken, Lido, and staked.us collectively controls 36.6% of the stake Afaik Lido currently has 9 node operators. 9 + the other 3 = 12.

Pointing to A Vitalik Tweet:  “Some updates on decentralization stats since a week ago: * Participant count over 3k * Nakamoto coefficient up from 25 to 34 * Herfindahl score down from 0.0164 to 0.0126 (down is good); ~30% more decentralized based on this metric More participation = more decentralization!”

Larry stated:  Vitalik tweeted about the same topic back in December, although he uses a different definition of the Nakamoto coefficient (I use 34%, he uses 51%). The number necessary for a 34% attack on Eth2 is 12, exactly as I guessed.

Community response: Thorchain will be theoretically 1 in the future with the pause function; 60% need to report to pause inbounds and outbounds. Pausing for 25 minutes is hardly the same as shutting down the network. But it needs to be limited to avoid DOS scenarios.

Pausing for 25 minutes is hardly the same as shutting down the network. But it needs to be limited to avoid DOS scenarios.

How can 7 validators out of 130 shut down the network? Shutting down the network only requires 1/3 of the voting power.

It’s a real problem that people keep on staking with exchanges, who usually offer the lowest commission. Funny how decentralized quickly becomes centralized.

Even as a Terra permabull, this has always been a concern of mine. It would be nice to see more projects follow the NEB route of rewarding lower voting power validator delegates.

Wow, that’s scary that only two validators can shut down polygon. Is that the famous “FUD” about polygon about a bunch of people having the keys controlling the network? Nope, that’s a separate issue.